Update

AI is already being used

Published October 8, 2026

In February, Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s AI lab and a Nobel Prize winner, stood up at a world summit in New Delhi and said AI will be “something like ten times the impact of the Industrial Revolution, but happening at ten times the speed,” unfolding “in a decade rather than a century.”

The Industrial Revolution took generations. People had time to adjust, retrain and move. If he’s even half right, we don’t get that time. You don’t have to believe the biggest predictions to see what that means for a small town.

Before you read the rest, do me a favour. Whatever you already think about AI, whether you’re excited, worried, confused or just sick of hearing about it, set it aside for a few minutes. Those reactions are all fair. But most of what people know about AI comes from headlines, and the headlines skip the part that matters to a town like ours. Fair warning, this is a long one. My goal isn’t to sell you on AI. It’s to explain why it matters for Cochrane.

Why I’m the one writing this

I’m the CIO at Bercell Integrated Technologies. As a CIO, it’s my job to stay on top of technology, and for the past two years a big part of that has been AI. I didn’t learn it by asking a chatbot to write a few emails. I put in a lot of hours testing these tools, locking them down, and finding out where they work and where they fall flat. It’s a steep learning curve. I did it because I was interested, but also because the more I saw it in action, the more I understood how much it will change the workplace. This is my day job, so I’m not going to tiptoe around it.

What AI actually is now

For most people, AI means ChatGPT. You type a question and it types an answer. Maybe it helped you write a letter, fix a photo or make a poster. That’s the part everyone has seen, and it’s the smallest part.

Under the hood, these tools are software that has read more text than any person ever could, and they’ve gotten very good at predicting what a useful answer looks like. They don’t think like a person, they don’t know Cochrane, and they can be confidently wrong. That’s why a person always has to check the work.

The real change in the past year is that AI went from answering questions to doing work. Instead of asking it something, you give it a job: read this stack of documents and pull out what matters, fill in this pile of forms, draft this report so a person can check it instead of spending a day writing it. The newer tools (the industry calls them “agents”) can open files, work through the steps on their own and hand back a first draft. Going from “I tried ChatGPT once” to putting AI to work like that is a much bigger jump than people expect. It takes training, direction and rules.

Why this matters in a council race

Two reasons.

First, the timeline. The people building AI expect office work to change dramatically over the next few years. Anthropic’s CEO has said AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. Microsoft’s head of AI said this year that most computer-based office tasks will be automated within 12 to 18 months. Those guys sell this stuff, so take their numbers with a grain of salt. But even the cautious economists don’t think it stops. MIT’s Daron Acemoglu, a 2024 Nobel economist and one of the most skeptical voices out there, still estimates that about 5 per cent of all tasks can be profitably handed to AI within ten years. Four years is one council term. Whichever forecast you believe, this lands on the next council’s watch whether anyone at that table is ready or not.

And if anyone has doubts, I can tell you from doing this every day: AI is already good enough to have a major impact on office work (and plenty of other jobs). It’s so new that the software built around it hasn’t caught up yet, and most people haven’t been shown how to use it. The AI is ready. The tools and the training aren’t.

Second, think about what the Town of Cochrane is: an organization with tight finances, running on your tax dollars, that holds personal information about every one of us. Your tax records, your utility account, your rec registrations. A town in that position can’t afford to ignore AI governance. With clear rules, AI makes every staff hour go further. Without them, your personal information can end up somewhere it should never be, like the free version of ChatGPT.

AI is already in Town Hall

AI is already inside Town Hall, whether anyone planned it or not. Some of the Town’s own posters are made with AI, and the office software the Town uses now pushes AI features by default. Statistics Canada reported in July that more than one in three Canadian workers had used generative AI on the job in the past year, and CDW Canada’s 2026 workplace report, released last month, found that a third of office workers still have no employer-approved AI tools at all. People are using it because it helps them get their work done, with or without rules.

I’m not saying anything has gone wrong at the Town. I’m saying the Town doesn’t have an AI policy that tells staff what’s safe and what isn’t, and staff deserve that clarity. Leaving them to guess isn’t fair to them or to residents.

The AI isn’t the hard part anymore

What most people miss is that the AI itself is no longer the hard part. The technology that can read through years of council documents, pull together the history of a road, or draft a first version of a staff report already exists, and it’s good. What’s missing is the local part: tools set up for the Town’s own records and work, rules about what they’re allowed to touch, and staff trained to use them. That’s where the work is, and that’s where the payoff is.

If a staff report that takes a full day to research could take an hour, I know which one makes sense for a town that’s watching every dollar and has watched deadlines slip. With staff already stretched thin, those hours don’t disappear. They go back into the work that’s been piling up.

The rules already exist, and a deadline is coming

Cochrane doesn’t have to invent the rules from scratch. On January 21, 2026, Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner and the Ontario Human Rights Commission released joint Principles for the Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence. They lay out what responsible AI looks like for public institutions, including keeping it privacy-protective, transparent and accountable, with a real person responsible for the results.

There’s also a deadline. Starting January 1, 2027, changes to Ontario’s municipal privacy law will require municipalities to do a privacy impact assessment before collecting personal information, and to report serious privacy breaches to the Commissioner. That’s the first few months of the next term. Someone on council just has to know this is coming and push to get ahead of it.

On the concerns

Some people think the Town shouldn’t touch AI at all, because of the environmental cost or worries about jobs. Those are fair concerns, and I share them. But AI isn’t going away, and the Town sitting it out won’t change that. Once staff see what it can do with their own workload, it stops being optional. Nobody wants to be stressed, behind schedule and repeating the same boring tasks every week or every month. Honestly, if the Town doesn’t use AI, the only thing that changes is that we miss out on the benefits.

That’s exactly why the Town needs rules. Good rules keep AI pointed at the work that actually matters, and they make sure it helps the staff we have carry their workload instead of becoming an excuse to cut them. To be clear, I’m not running to replace anyone at the Town with software.

What I’d push for

A written AI policy in the first year of this term, built on the IPC and OHRC principles, before these tools spread any further.
A firm rule that residents’ personal information never goes into a public AI tool.
And most important, training.

The software is the cheap part. The learning is what makes it pay off. Trained staff are the difference between AI that looks impressive and AI that actually saves the Town money.

The 2026 budget sets aside about $147,000 for the Town’s general government travel, training and education. Last year that line was budgeted at about $130,000, and only about $54,000 of it was spent. That tells me money isn’t the problem. Time is. Staff are too busy to get to training. In the next budget I’d push to put a portion of that existing money toward AI training for staff, council and the mayor. No new spending.

Where I stand

The other candidates bring strengths I don’t have, and I mean that. But I’m the only candidate on this ballot who works hands-on with these systems every day, and I’ll keep staying on top of them for the whole term. The way the Town’s staff work is going to change before this term is done. Council needs at least one person at the table who understands how, and I’m asking for your vote to be that person.

Sources

If you think I have got something wrong here, tell me and I will fix it. Corrections are logged below.

Updates and corrections

October 8, 2026. First published.

← All updates